FUKUSHIMA & OTHER NUKE DISASTERS

Most people think they have to die to go to hell but that is not true anymore. Today, in the mainstream press, they announced the existence of a hell hole in Japan at the destroyed nuclear power station at Fukushima. We have a hot spot on our planet that has never been imagined before and in the face of it human technology is helpless.

At the levels of radiation now being found a Fukushima, a robot would be able to operate for less than two hours before it was destroyed. And Japan’s National Institute of Radiological Sciences said medical professionals had never even thought about encountering this level of radiation in their work.

Tourists, employees and children on tours were exposed to radiation from uranium sitting in the Grand Canyon's museum collection building for nearly two decades, according to the park's safety manager.

Elston 'Swede' Stephenson, the park's safety, health and wellness manager, warned of possible health consequences to staff and the public from three five-gallon buckets of uranium ore which he claims were stored next to a taxidermy exhibit from 2000 until June 18, 2018, according to AZ Central.

Stephenson revealed the information in a rogue email to staff after bosses failed to issue any information on the exposure for eight months, he claims.

He believes top management are now involved in a cover-up operation, saying he has been cut off from all information about the exposure.

In his email, Stephenson wrote: 'If you were in the Museum Collections Building (2C) between the year 2000 and June 18, 2018, you were 'exposed' to uranium by OSHA's definition.'

In truth, the cataclysm was born of the planned economy and communist bureaucracy itself.

For this was an empire of falsified statistics, of unattainable deadlines easily beaten by corner-cutting, sullen indifference to individual responsibility, terror at conveying bad news to superiors and chains of toadying yes-men clinging to their comfortable party privileges. They made the disaster at Chernobyl almost inevitable.

Police have not yet ascertained how the radioactive substance ended up in a scrap yard, but said they are investigating the case "from all possible angles."

India's Central Crime Station (CCS) has recovered an unspecified quantity of a missing radioactive isotope of Cesium-137 (CS-137) which was reported missing from a facility belonging to the Oil and Natural Gas Corporation (ONGC) in Rajamahendravaram, Andhra Pradesh.

Over 126,000 barrels of radioactive material are stored in the Asse mine in Lower Saxony, a state in northwest Germany bordering the North Sea, a fact that has many locals - as well as the global anti-nuke community - frustrated.

Manfred Kramer, a member of the Social Democratic Party of Germany, lives close to the Asse salt mine in which the decaying waste is stored and — while acknowledging that politicians are finally beginning to take notice — has long protested against having radioactive waste in the old mine, Tekportal reported.

"It's nice that she's finally coming," Kramer said, referring to Environment Minister Svenja Schulze's upcoming visit to the mine, which was originally used for the extraction of potash salt until 1965. "Soon she'll have been in office for a year. It sure took a while!" he quipped, according to Deutsche Welle.

Weapons-grade plutonium from South Carolina was secretly shipped to a nuclear security site in Nevada months ago despite Nevadans' protests, the Department of Energy revealed on Wednesday.

The Justice Department notified a federal judge in Reno that the government trucked in the radioactive material to store at a site 70 miles north of Las Vegas before Nevada asked a court to block the move in November.

An earlier probe carrying a camera captured images of pieces of melted fuel in the reactor last year, and robotic probes in the two other reactors have detected traces of damaged fuel, but the exact location, contents and other details remain largely unknown.

Toshiba's energy systems unit said experiments with the new probe planned in February are key to determining the proper equipment and technologies needed to remove the fuel debris, the most challenging part of the decommissioning process expected to take decades.

Five-year prison terms were sought Wednesday for three former executives of Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings Inc. for their alleged failure to prevent the Fukushima nuclear disaster triggered by the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami.
At the Tokyo District Court, court-appointed lawyers acting as prosecutors said if the three had collected information properly and prepared necessary safety measures it would have been possible to predict the massive tsunami and prevent the disaster.

Tsunehisa Katsumata, 78, chairman of the company at the time of the disaster at the Fukushima No. 1 power plant, and Ichiro Takekuro, 72, and Sakae Muto, 68, both former vice presidents, have pleaded not guilty, arguing the tsunami was unforeseeable and the disaster would have occurred even if they had implemented preventive measures.

A final hearing for the defense will be held next March.

Webmaster's Commentary:

Only 5 years for the devastation created by Fukushima, on top of lack of real planning by these guys, since 2008?!?

It should be a life sentence for these guys, without parole, and not, please, in the Japanese equivalent of a "Club Fed."

Five-year prison terms were sought Wednesday for three former executives of Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings Inc. for their alleged failure to prevent the Fukushima nuclear disaster triggered by the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami.At the Tokyo District Court, court-appointed lawyers acting as prosecutors said if the three had collected information properly and prepared necessary safety measures it would have been possible to predict the massive tsunami and prevent the disaster.

Donald Trump is the Ugly American incarnate. More so than even Dick Cheney or George Bush the Younger. His boorish manners and in-your-face self-promotion puts to shame the servile European, Japanese and other spittle-lickers who have profited from their associations with Washington at the expense of their compatriots. These would-be friends of Washington have nowhere to hide from the disgrace Trump metes out to them before their own peoples. All of this is good and necessary medicine to set the world on its way towards a multipolar future. Far more than we “American dissidents” have been able to muster.

Therefore, I can only say “godspeed” to Donald Trump in the New Year 2019. May he willy-nilly continue to do God’s work.

Webmaster's Commentary:

As a Christian pacifist activist, I have to confess; I do have a hug and a punch (more like a gentle tapping, nothing hurt) relationship with this President.

I am very morally concerned about how the US military's aided and abetted Saudi war crimes in Yemen, to which President Trump is particularly tone-deaf, when thousands of innocents have been murdered.

I am very hopeful, that this drawdown in Syria will make it possible for the country to return to some kind of normalcy, and all the rebuilding help it can get.

But getting immigration completely legal again; this is an area where I share President Trump's agenda. I love people, and agree that having good people immigrate to our country who have skills, and embrace the American ethos, is a wonderful thing. Please, just let them come legally, and healthy, is all I am asking.

I love those words, written by Emily Lazarus, emblazoned on plaque placed on the Stature of Liberty;

The issues here are that, A, we're living in the 21st century, and B, technology has taken over, big time, for what used to be done by unskilled labor.

OK, illegal immigrants have no money; they cannot speak the language of the country in which they want to live;; and may be desperately ill with diseases the US has barely seen in recent years, and have zero relevant job skills but expect that the US government is supposed to take care of you?!?

The article goes on to question: "What are the facts behind the economic impact of illegal immigrants? We checked his (Trump's) figures with immigration and tax policy experts across the political spectrum,who said he was exaggerating, at best.

Oh, Really?!?

"A little high," said Robert Rector, a senior research fellow with the Heritage Foundation.

Rector said his 2013 estimate pegged the cost of undocumented immigrants — the cost of services received minus their tax contributions — was about $54 billion a year.

A precise cost is nearly impossible to ascertain, many experts said. That's in part because undocumented immigrants operate within the shadows, leaving their full fiscal contributions — and use of taxpayer-funded resources — at least somewhat unknown.

"It's really hard to calculate anyone’s 'net cost' or 'net benefit.' We all use all kinds of services, from roads to military protection. How do we apportion what part of that is something I or you or an immigrant use?" said Kallick.

But let's say, for the sake of argument, the cost, currently, is around, +/- $54 billion; but that, in my world, is $54 billion too much, with our homeless Vets living rough in our streets, and our infrastructure crumbling, and there being "allegedly" no money to fix it.

I am very glad President Trump is attempting to do something about this, and the Dementocrats are looking, like disgruntled, petulant juveniles, through refusing the funding for a security wall at the border between the US and Mexico.

In my Nov. 16 column, I reported on potential radiation risks posed by California’s Woolsey wildfire having burned over parts or all of the Santa Susana Field Laboratory—south of Simi Valley, Calif., 30 miles outside Los Angeles—site of at least four partial or total nuclear reactor meltdowns.

The field laboratory operated 10 experimental reactors and conducted rocket engine tests. In his 2014 book Atomic Accidents, researcher James Mahaffey writes, “The cores in four experimental reactors on site … melted.” Reactor core melts always result in the release of large amounts of radioactive gases and particles. Clean up of the deeply contaminated site has not been conducted in spite of a 2010 agreement.

Last night, the Woolsey fire burned the contaminated Santa Susana Field Laboratory (SSFL), a former nuclear and rocket engine testing site. Footage from local television showed flames surrounding rocket test stands, and the fire’s progress through to Oak Park indicates that much of the toxic site burned.

A statement released by the California Dept. of Toxic Substances Control (DTSC) said that its staff,

“do not believe the fire has caused any releases of hazardous materials that would pose a risk to people exposed to the smoke.”

The statement failed to assuage community concerns given DTSC’s longtime pattern of misinformation about SSFL’s contamination and its repeated broken promises to clean it up.

While families, firefighters and first responders inhale potentially radioactive and toxic chemicals in this awful smoke, the DTSC says it has no evidence that the smoke is unusually dangerous. This is an agency that has repeatedly lied to us, minimized risk from the Santa Susana Field Lab and broken every promise ever made regarding the clean up. Why would we trust them when the lab is on fire – especially now that we know the fire actually began at Santa Susana?

Though the amount of radiation in the water far exceeds legally-permitted levels, according to the plant’s operator and documents reviewed by the U.K.’s Telegraph, there’s apparently no other place to put it at the site, which is on the verge of seeing its storage capacity completely maxed out.

Reports indicate that approximately 1.09 million tons of contaminated water currently being stored inside 900 tanks at Fukushima will soon be drained in the Pacific in order to make more space for new water, a move that’s sparking outrage among local residents and a number of environmental organizations that worry about what the vast contamination will do to the world’s largest body of water.

The Japanese government is allowing residents to relocate back to nuclear radiation-stricken areas near its Fukushima nuclear plant despite calls from the United Nations to bring down radiation levels first before exposing women and children to the environment.

Following the powerful tsunami that left 18,000 Japanese citizens dead or missing in March 2011, the island nation also had to contend with the partial meltdown of several light-water nuclear reactors at Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, once among the 15 largest nuclear plants in the world.

Baskut Tuncak, United Nations special rapporteur on hazardous substances and waste, said Thursday that people felt they were "being forced to return to areas that are unsafe, including those with radiation levels above what the government previously considered safe," AFP reported.

Water that the Japanese Government is planning to release into the Pacific Ocean from the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant contains radioactive material well above legally permitted levels, according to the plant's operator and documents.

Authorities are running out of space to store contaminated water that has come into contact with fuel that escaped from three nuclear reactors after the plant was destroyed in the earthquake and tsunami that struck north-east Japan in March 2011.

The plan to release just over a million tons of water, currently stored in 900 tanks, into the Pacific has angered local residents and environmental organisations, as well as groups in South Korea and Taiwan fearful that radioactivity might wash up on their shores.

A young mother recommended for a bravery award after she used her body to shield her infant daughter from hail stones which broke in through the window of their car during a supercell thunderstorm says she’s shocked by the gesture.

The only promise that is new about the promised peace plan is the way it will be forced on the Palestinians: no one has promised that the plan itself will be new. With Saudi Arabia and Egypt—the outside—brought onside with the promise of continued military aid despite their crimes against humanity and violations of international law and the Palestinians weakened by being silenced, economically crushed and stripped of any friends to help them, the United States and Israel are now free to attempt to impose a peace plan on the Palestinians.

A “state of emergency” has been declared by the staff at Brunswick Nuclear Plant in Southport, North Carolina. Few details are available at the moment, but the emergency is currently classified as “an unusual event” due to flooding from Hurricane Florence.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is being tight-lipped about an “unusual event” which occurred at the Brunswick Nuclear Plant last Saturday which forced a “hot shutdown” of both the plant’s Generation IV-type reactors 1 and 2.
The NRC classified the emergency as an “unusual event” but provided little to no details on the situation.

Additionally, the NRC reports that weather conditions from Tropical Storm Florence are currently preventing workers from accessing the plant.

Webmaster's Commentary:

Why do I get a sickening feeling in the pit of my stomach, that something really horrific has happened, and the NRC will not tell the public, because sloppy maintenance here may have caused a catastrophe to start to unfold?!?

The two reactor Brunswick nuclear plant on the Cape Fear River in North Carolina may be critically threatened by flooding from hurricane Florence. The nuclear plant has a sea wall designed to withstand 22 feet of flooding according to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

The National Weather Service in Wilmington NC reported on Thursday that the Cape Fear River is expected to crest at up to 22 feet on Tuesday Sept. 17 swollen by hurricane Florence storm surge and downpours.

The seawall was constructed following the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan after a tsunami overtopped the sea wall and damaged plant electric power and controls leading to catastrophic meltdowns and release of radiation.

The advisory also warns military activities linked to the bloody conflict in Syria have been ramped across Iran's airspace.

Tensions between Tehran and Washington are running high following Donald Trump’s controversial decision to pull out of the landmark Iran nuclear deal re-introduce economic sanctions last month.

Flight Service Bureau, which provides safety information on airspace to airlines, said "without seeming alarmist", the deteriorating relationship between the US and Iran must be taken into account when planning flights in Iran's airspace.

Webmaster's Commentary:

This is getting just about as serious as is a heart attack: I find myself very alarmed at these developments.

UN human rights experts have slammed the Japanese government for the alleged exploitation of “tens of thousands” of workers, as well as migrants and the homeless, said to be cleaning up the mangled Fukushima nuclear plant.

In a three-way joint statement, released Thursday via the United Nations, the human rights experts detailed their deep concern over the “possible exploitation by deception regarding the risks of exposure to radiation, possible coercion into accepting hazardous working conditions because of economic hardships, and the adequacy of training and protective measures” following the 2011 disaster."

Radioactive particles from the Fukushima disaster have been detected in – of all places – California wines.

Inspired by tests conducted in the aftermath of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, researchers at France’s National Center for Scientific Research, or CNRS, decided to test a series of California wines dating between 2009 and 2012. They looked for traces of radioactive particles, specifically cesium-137, a man-made isotope.

Smithsonian.com reported on the team’s findings:

Their findings, newly published in the pre-print online journal Arxiv, suggest that currents and atmospheric patterns carried radioactive particles across the Pacific, where they settled on grapevines growing in California’s wine regions. The team writes that bottles produced following the nuclear meltdown contain increased levels of cesium-137, with the cabernet revealing double the amount of pre-Fukushima radiation.

Webmaster's Commentary:

IF you happen to have a resonance with California wines, look at the lable for the date of the vintage, and chose accordingly.

As the White House convenes a policy meeting on Iran Thursday involving senior Pentagon officials and cabinet advisers under national security adviser John Bolton, and after a week of intense saber-rattling by President Donald Trump and his Iranian counterpart Hassan Rouhani, a new bombshell report by Australia's ABC says the White House is drawing up plans to strike Iran's alleged nuclear facilities as early as next month.

Senior figures in the Australia's Turnbull government have told the ABC they believe the US is prepared to bomb Iran's nuclear capability. The bombing could be as early as next month. —ABC report

Webmaster's Commentary:

Can you imagine the fear?

Maybe you don't have to. Maybe you are old enough to remember Three Mile Island, or Chernobyl. Maybe you're one of the people living around the Pacific where the radiation meters have been singing their songs of death since Fukushima.

Can you feel the horror? There is an invisible killer dancing in the air. Maybe hiding in that rain drop. You cannot know for sure.

That metallic taste in your mouth; is it being that scared? Or is it something ... worse?

You cannot know for sure. There is an invisible killer dancing in the air.

You wish you could stop breathing, but of course you can't. And with each breath comes an unspoken question; Is this the breath during which I inhale my own end? Is there an irrevocable link between this breath and my final breath to come? Is this the breath that deforms my unborn child? Is this the breath that transforms my future from an old age filled with family and friends, to loneliness, lingering pain, and a horrible death?

You cannot know for sure. There is an invisible killer dancing in the air.

Or maybe it was on that stamp you licked, or in the wine you drank, or the cookie you ate.

Maybe you showered with the killer, slept with the killer, shared your clothes with the killer.

You cannot know for sure. There is an invisible killer dancing in the air.

Now imagine living with that fear, day after day after day; fear for yourself, fear for the lives and health of your loved ones. Imagine the long sleepless nights wondering if the next day will invite the killer into your home; if the rain will wash the killer onto the food you will eat.

Imagine.

Then imagine a monster so evil they would inflict that endless fear onto innocent and unoffending people.

Then stop imagining, because it really happened, but just once but twice.

What happened by accident at Three-Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima was done intentionally by Israel to the people of Iraq, when Israel bombed the nuclear power plant at Osirik in the erroneous assumption that Iraq was building nuclear weapons. Then Israel did it again in Syria. Thankfully, there were no nuclear weapons at the Iraq or Syrian targets, or the people of Iraq and Syria would have suffered what those people living downwind from Three-Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima (and indeed the whole northern hemisphere) all suffered.

But no doubt, those innocent and unoffending Iraqi and Syrian people knew the fear of wondering whether the silent killer was there in their homes moment to moment, just as you are wondering whether the silent killer is in your home this very moment, even as you read these words.

Israel did that to those people; cursed them with that endless dread that lingered for months on end.

And now the United States wants to bomb more nuclear facilities in Iran so that what happened by accident at Three-Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima, will be done deliberately to the people of Iran, who have not invaded or threatened anyone.

There are indeed monsters living among us.

And we know them by their deeds.

Just think about that when you are lying in the dark, afraid to breathe.

More than 60 studies have shown increases of childhood leukemia around nuclear facilities worldwide. Despite this finding, there has never been independent analysis in the US examining connections between childhood cancer and nuclear facilities. The US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) had tasked the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) to conduct such a study, but then withdrew funding, claiming publicly that it would be too expensive.

Webmaster's Commentary:

The NRC withdrew the money for NAS study, because they probably already knew what a proper scientific study would reveal.

This means that the NRC is "cherry picking" its information, to make sure that nothing contradicts it's suspiciously "soft science" here.

What was the most dangerous nuclear disaster in world history? Most people would say the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in Ukraine, but they’d be wrong. In 2011, an earthquake, believed to be an aftershock of the 2010 earthquake in Chile, created a tsunami that caused a meltdown at the TEPCO nuclear power plant in Fukushima, Japan. Three nuclear reactors melted down and what happened next was the largest release of radiation into the water in the history of the world. Over the next three months, radioactive chemicals, some in even greater quantities than Chernobyl, leaked into the Pacific Ocean. However, the numbers may actually be much higher as Japanese official estimates have been proven by several scientists to be flawed in recent years.

If that weren’t bad enough, Fukushima continues to leak an astounding 300 tons of radioactive waste into the Pacific Ocean every day.

Radioactive levels are increasing in wine from California's Napa Valley, thanks to the radioactive cloud that drifted from the Fukushima disaster in 2011.
Researchers from the University of Bordeaux Centre d'Études Nucléaires de Bordeaux-Gradignan (CNRS) in France tested California wine from before and after the Fukushima disaster and found there was double the amount of cesium-137 in its Cabernet Sauvignon after the 2011 tsunami caused the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactors to leak.

The radioactive cloud released by the plant drifted all the way to California’s Napa Valley. There, trace amounts of cesium-137 made its way into the vineyard grapes.

The levels varied depending on the wine, researchers found, with Cabernet Sauvignon reds having a higher amount and rosé having the least.

We wish we could say this is from The Onion but it's a now viral story that's but the latest representation of extreme government incompetence in handling deadly radioactive materials. Two Department of Energy security officials tasked with transporting deadly substances left plutonium in the back of their Ford Expedition, where it was promptly stolen from a Marriott parking lot in San Antonio.

And over a year later and after what appears to be a ham-handed investigation that was prematurely shut down perhaps for fear of public embarrassment, authorities still have no clue as to the whereabouts of what the government admits are "bomb-usable materials".

A new, shocking report by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University’s Department of Engineering and Public Policy (EPP), Harvard University, and the University of California San Diego School of Global Policy and Strategy discovered that the US nuclear power industry could be on the verge of a collapse — a reality that many have yet to realize.

Published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS), “US nuclear power: The vanishing low-carbon wedge” examined 99 nuclear power reactors in 30 states, operated by 30 different power companies. As of 2017, there are two new reactors under construction, but 34 reactors have been permanently shut down as many plants reach the end of their lifespan.

Webmaster's Commentary:

The question which should be pursued here, is what is the best, cheapest, and most renewable form of energy which needs to come in a post-nuclear age?!?

People who live near the Tihange nuclear power plant in Belgium’s Wallonia region have serious concerns about the safety of the station which has experienced several shutdowns in recent years.

The station’s operator, Engie-Electrabe, found “instability” in the reinforced concrete ceiling of the reactor’s armored bunker during a planned check that started on March 30, the newspaper Soir reported on Thursday.

According to the newspaper, company specialists also determined that the “anomalies” in the reinforced concrete had been there since the time the bunker was built.

TEPCO is conducting an independent geological survey to confirm the absence of active faults in Aomori Prefecture, where it wants to resume the construction of a Fukushima-type nuclear plant, frozen following the 2011 disaster.
“It’s necessary to form a consortium for building a nuclear plant that is excellent in safety, technology and economy,” TEPCO President Tomoaki Kobayakawa said in Tokyo, announcing the decision to conduct a survey of the Aomori Prefecture nuclear site.

The Higashidori Nuclear Power Plant hosts two adjoining sites administered by Tohoku Electric Power Company and Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO). While Tohoku Unit 1 began commercial operations in December 2005, TEPCO never got a chance to finish their unit, the construction of which began only in January 2011. All activity at the site has ceased since the March 2011 Fukushima nuclear meltdown.

Webmaster's Commentary:

Why Kobayakawa has not been handed his hat, and fired, is a complete mystery to me.

But the Japanese people need to ask themselves; do we need another Fukishima-type disaster, no matter the pretty words defending the new project, when they know that TEPCO will simply value engineer the next one no better than it did Fukishima?!?

In the early stages of research, before Dimona existed, there were accidents that exposed scientists to lethal levels of radiation. Some of them died and their names are known (though not well). Less known is that Dimona had a series of accidents - the most serious in 1966 - that exposed hundreds of its workers to similarly lethal doses.

Avner Cohen, the world’s leading scholar of the Israeli nuclear programme, told me that in the first 20-25 years the processes used to protect workers were primitive and sloppy. Mistakes were common, often not intentionally, but because relatively little was known about the proper handling of radioactive materials. In some cases, documentation was fabricated.

Sampling milk from private farms in the Ukraine’s Rivne region, scientists from Exeter University and the National University of Life and Environmental Sciences made a startling find - radioactive material from more than three decades ago has leached into the livestock.

The lingering nuclear fallout from 1986 means farmers are unwittingly producing milk with radioactive caesium levels above the Ukraine safety standard of 100 becquerel per litre. The becquerel is a unit of radioactivity, with the new report documenting how some farms had milk with a radioactivity concentration of around 500 becquerel per litre.

This is where the stumblers are being moved to. All the stories I have stumbled, over 110,000 articles are still available. There are tens of thousands of your stories I stumbled the last 7 years.
I will continue to put your stories up at Mix.com,but it will take some time to rebuild traffic and figure out the best way to do that with this new site.

The machine is sending data to Safecast, an NGO born after the March 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster that says it has now built the world's largest radiation dataset, thanks to the efforts of citizen scientists like Seirinji's priest Sadamaru Okano.

Like many Japanese, Okano lost faith in the government after the nuclear meltdown seven years ago.

"The government didn't tell us the truth, they didn't tell us the true measures," he told AFP, seated inside the 150-year-old temple.

A major wildfire is sweeping through the Chernobyl nuclear disaster area. The authorities have deployed dozens of fire trucks as firefighting aircraft bombard the radioactive exclusion zone with massive amounts of water.

The fire inside the Chernobyl 'dead zone,' which is now part of Ukraine, started on Tuesday morning, when dry grass was ignited, local emergency services said in a statement. The wildfire subsequently reached a forest, where up to 10 hectares (24 acres) are now in flames.

Some 29 vehicles and 126 personnel have been dispatched at the scene, with several planes and helicopters dropping water from the sky on the area engulfed by wildfire.

The zone saw another large blaze last year, which scorched 25 hectares (60 acres) of land.

PHILADELPHIA (CNN) – With every news alert or breaking story, our world seems to be pushed further and further into crisis. It is taking a serious toll on our environment but also on our mental health.

The world has always been stressful, but experiencing acute events occurring thousands of miles away is a new and challenging phenomenon. On any given day, it feels like the world is falling apart.

How can we brace for disaster and find the strength to withstand it? How will we adapt to our greater exposure to trauma? And will our mental health be sacrificed in the process?

Even though the nuclear disaster in Fukushima took place over seven years ago, radioactive waste has continued to build up as ground water flows through the destroyed reactor buildings and becomes contaminated. This creates a staggering 160 tons of contaminated water each day.

While the purification devices used by the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) do remove most of the radioactive materials, a radioactive isotope of hydrogen known as tritium cannot be removed, and tritium-contaminated water continues to cause big problems.

TEPCO cleared an area the size of 32 soccer fields to hold waste storage tanks with a total capacity of 1.13 million tons to deal with the water, but that space is almost completely filled, with about 1.07 million tons of capacity already consumed.

The Tokyo Electric Power Company is running out of container space to store water contaminated by tritium outside the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant, and it's also running out of room for building more tanks, according to Yomiuri Shimbum, a Japanese newspaper, which is creating an intractable problem for the utility, which has been tasked with supervising the cleanup of Fukushima.

The Japanese government has been desperately trying to accelerate the cleanup ahead of the upcoming 2020 Olympic Games in Tokyo - and it's a miracle it hasn't run into this issue sooner. TEPCO is still struggling with how to dispose of the tritium-tainted water. Options discussed have included dumping it into the ocean, but that proposal has angered local fishing communities.

The Tokyo Electric Power Company is running out of container space to store water contaminated by tritium outside the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant, and it's also running out of room for building more tanks, according to Yomiuri Shimbum , a Japanese newspaper, which is creating an intractable problem for the utility, which has been tasked with supervising the cleanup of Fukushima.

The Japanese government has been desperately trying to accelerate the cleanup ahead of the upcoming 2020 Olympic Games in Tokyo - and it's a miracle it hasn't run into this issue sooner. TEPCO is still struggling with how to dispose of the tritium-tainted water. Options discussed have included dumping it into the ocean, but that proposal has angered local fishing communities.

Webmaster's Commentary:

That the executives from TEPCO haven't been run out of town by a furious Japanese public, and completely thrown out of their jobs, because of the rank incompetence which generated this disaster in the first place, is an absolute mystery to me.

FDA just approved the first drug to prevent migraines. About 1 in 5 girls and one in 16 men get migraines, in step with the yank sick headache Foundation.
"It may not get rid of all of them, but it really dramatically improves following things...

A reactor at EDF Energy’s (EDF.PA) Hunterston B nuclear power plant in Scotland will remain offline for additional safety checks after cracks were found in its core, Britain’s Office for Nuclear Regulation (ONR) said.

Ageing reactors generate just over 20 percent of Britain’s power but almost half of this capacity, including Hunterston, is due to go offline by 2025, prompting the government to plan new plants.

The Republic of Serbia appears to be making moves that would ultimately open the door to holding NATO responsible for the significant spike in cancer illnesses and deaths which followed NATO’s bombing of Serbia with depleted uranium shells.

President of the Serbian Parliament Maja Gojkovic drafted a resolution in parliament that would establish a commission charged with investigating the impact of the NATO bombing in 1999 on the health of citizens and the environment, with particular emphasis on the effects caused by the use of depleted uranium shells.

Previously, the Italian parliament, recognized that NATO’s use of these nuclear waste tainted weapons were the primary cause of illness and death for Italian NATO soldiers in the occupied southern Serbian region of Kosovo. Serbian officials are in an active conversation with the Italians, whose findings may better inform any Serbian investigation.

One of the nuclear reactors at the Hunterston B nuclear power plant in Scotland could remain offline until the end of the year, after fresh cracks expanding at a higher rate were discovered in the graphite blocks forming its core.

Reactor 3 at the aging Hunterston B nuclear power station on the West coast of Scotland was initially taken offline on March 9 for a routine inspection, during which the Office for Nuclear Regulation (ONR) found new “keyway root cracks” in the reactor core. On Wednesday, operator EDF Energy announced that the reactor could remain offline for months until the problem is fixed.

“The inspections confirmed the expected presence of new keyway root cracks in the reactor core and also identified these happening at a slightly higher rate than modeled,” EDF Energy said. “While Hunterston B Reactor 3 could return to operation from the current outage, it will remain offline” until the company addresses safety concerns.

The radiation dispersed into the environment by the three reactor meltdowns at Fukushima-Daiichi in Japan has exceeded that of the April 26, 1986 Chernobyl catastrophe, so we may stop calling it the “second worst” nuclear power disaster in history. Total atmospheric releases from Fukushima are estimated to be between 5.6 and 8.1 times that of Chernobyl, according to the 2013 World Nuclear Industry Status Report. Professor Komei Hosokawa, who wrote the report’s Fukushima section, told London’s Channel 4 News then, “Almost every day new things happen, and there is no sign that they will control the situation in the next few months or years.”

Tokyo Electric Power Co. has estimated that about 900 peta-becquerels have spewed from Fukushima, and the updated 2016 TORCH Report estimates that Chernobyl dispersed 110 peta-becquerels. [1] (A Becquerel is one atomic disintegration per second. The “peta-becquerel” is a quadrillion, or a thousand trillion Becquerels.)

Due to an increased level of radiation in the given block, maintenance works in the reactor have been most recently handicapped, but the maintenance company says there is no need to worry.

The reactor cooling system at the Doel nuclear power station has suffered a leak, although no danger is posed to the personnel or to the environment, the operating company Engie-Electrabel reported Saturday.

"A minor water efflux has been spotted in a reserve pipe line of the cooling system. The efflux is rather small, we are still well below the mark which would cause an automatic switch-off of the reactor. It does not affect security," the company’s representative noted.

Two groups of Chinese researchers have reportedly confirmed a risk from radioactive exposure to their countrymen after a North Korean nuclear test site appeared to have partially collapsed.

North Korea's Mount Mantap has contained every known nuclear test in the country: the Punggye-ri nuclear test site sits under it in a network of tunnels. After a thermonuclear device was tested in early September 2017, seismic activity at the mountain was recorded in the form of a 6.3-magnitude earthquake, according to the US Geological Survey's findings, while the China Earthquake Networks Center detected a 3.4 magnitude follow-up quake.

Almost immediately, it was reported that the mountain had experienced a tunnel collapse, although with some uncertainty. Now, the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post reports that Chinese researchers have confirmed that the mountain collapsed on itself.

The United States is struggling to handle the excessive amounts of plutonium generated at the cores of its many retired nuclear reactors, according to a new report, raising fears that it might end up in the wrong hands.

Today, there are some 54 metric tons of surplus plutonium stored in nuclear facilities the US Department of Energy operates around the country, according to Reuters.

In Pantex, a plant located near Amarillo, Texas, the surplus plutonium has long exceeded the 20,000 cores, also known as “pits,” that regulations allow such facilities to store in their temporary storage facility.

That means a mishap in the process, which is mostly done manually by contract workers, can trigger massive nuclear explosions.

While in the past the US simply used the leftover plutonium to produce more nuclear munitions, it is now obliged under a 2010 treaty with Russia to keep its arsenal under 1,550 warheads.

Webmaster's Commentary:

The problem of what to do with nuclear waste is one requiring the highest level of attention by a Federal government which constantly exhibits all the classic symptoms of ADHD.

Unfortunately, it will probably take it a catastrophe of horrific proportions, before this issue is intelligently addressed, and dealt with.

Faced with the post-3.11 reality of government (and corporate) policy that protects economic and security interests over public health and well-being, the majority of the 2 million inhabitants of Fukushima Prefecture are either unconscious of or have been encouraged to accept living with radioactive contamination…

Trump’s bid to increase U.S. arms sales, by using the Syria strikes as a PR blitz to show the effectiveness of U.S.-made weapons, is just the latest action taken by the president to cement his role as America’s top arms dealer

WASHINGTON – The week after the U.S., along with the U.K. and France, launched unilateral strikes against the Syrian government, the Trump administration is rolling out a “Buy American” weapons-selling initiative aimed at allowing other nations to buy even more weapons from U.S.-based arms manufacturers. According to Reuters, the initiative, set to be announced today, will speed up the approval of arms deals to U.S. allies and will call for members of President Donald Trump’s cabinet, as well as the president himself, to act as “closers” in major arms deals and salesmen for U.S. weapons companies at international air shows and weapons showcases.